Page 575 - Princess Maker

Author Notes:

Can you tell working on the IDW comics made me feel a little inadequate about my paneling?

Funny story about the runup to this: My five-year-old laptop, on which I'd made every page of the comic thus far, bricked last week! I was already planning to move the operation over to my more powerful desktop anyway, and I didn't lose anything critical... but still, what timing!

Anyway, here's what we'll call for the moment The Ticket Master.

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35 Comments:

Just recently my character Doc in Fallout Equestria took massive damage while assisting a town defend itself from a pirate raid. Doc was in the town tavern, helping in protecting a large chunk of the citizens with guns and molotov cocktails.

And then a pirate shot Doc three time in a burst, with two bullets being critical hits. Doc took a massive 159-point damage to his chest and head. His max HP is 149. Doc was nowhere near full health at the time.

Taking armor into account, Doc was in critical condition, laying half-unconscious in a pool of blood and -61 hit points. Some NPCs grabbed him and dragged him to another room in the tavern and someone tried to stabilize him. The other players don't know where Doc's at or what his condition is. He's MIA to them. Meanwhile, Doc is in a kind of half-coma dream where he's fighting voices and inner demons because he refuses to just let himself die this way.

And the townsfolk really don't want him to die. He's the most skilled doctor in town and not a bad shooter. They need him right now!

When I was ten, my best friend and I had to watch my three-year-old brother one day, so we took him to the school playground, where he enthusiastically took to the monkey bars. He was fine climbing up the circular rungs in the center on his own, but he slipped once he reached the top. Down he went, hitting his head against every bar as he fell.

My friend and I watched him land. I suspect our stunned looks matched his, waiting for the moment he'd catch his breath and burst out crying. I was dreading having to take him home and the tongue-lashing I'd get from my mother when I did.

"Wow!" my brother declared, with that bewildered look still plastered on my face.

My friend and I couldn't help but crack up. It was a good five minutes before any of us could stop laughing. What a relief. My brother remained as Abel as ever, and I'd be spared a Caining.

Years later, I had to tell that story to his four-year-old daughter after another kid pushed her foot and caused her to slip on a different set of monkey bars. She'd never split her lip before, and the combination of the pain and the bleeding freaked her out. Knowing her daddy had been through similar events was about the only way to console her.

...I didn't tell her about the time I came within millimetres of sacrificing her older brother to a ceiling fan, though.

Obscure Druidic Magic? Do you mean Quench? Our party Druid prepared it this one time in her first session as that character, on accounts of not knowing what the preferred Druid spells were. Well, one hastily extinguished burning building later, she decided it was useful. We have since used it against Nessian Warhounds (useful, but would have been more useful if it hadn't started a landslide that trapped half the party), soldiers in an old quarry (Drowned half of them) and a pirate galley (broke the thing's back where our catapult and the sorc lobbing fireballs hadn't touched it...)

You see, I play a Gnome Summoner in Pathfinder who I flavor as being a very magically attuned, disarmingly precious, super sweet little 9 year old girl. I even went so far as to give her terrible physical stats to further build on the concept of playing a little girl. The kid's got a -3 Strength, a -2 Dexterity, and a 0 for Constitution (I could have given her a negative here as well, but I didn't want her to die THAT easily). Her mental stats are awesome BTW - but that's mainly just to imply that she's disarmingly cute (thus has an incredible Charisma score - she's a Diplomancer) and intelligent (she's got a decent number of skill points to boot).

That typed though, my normal combat strategy (when she gets into combat) is to stay as far away from the fighting while her supernatural companion, Coal (a black-armored, oriental Hellknight-looking thing with raven wings), tears through the opposition with his Nodachi (and her buff spells).

Well, every now and then things don't turn out the way I'd hoped - and Ash (my little summoner) finds herself smack-dab in the middle of a melee. When that happens, my first response is to ask the GM -

"You wouldn't hit a little girl, would you?"

And the GM's response is usually something along the lines of -

"Take 20 damage."

We recently had a massive tavern brawl break out in a Pathfinder Organized Play adventure. Everyone was scrambling to pick up these red gem McGuffins that had been tossed into the center of the room. Coal of course manages to scoop up one - which makes him a target for the rest of the tavern-goers who want what he has. Since Coal can fly though, he can outrun his pursuers. Ash, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. She got beat down by the clerics of a war god - and it was not fun.

... uh, I don't really know how to respond to this Story Time... the only one's I can think of is when some of our own players decided to play kids, and tried pretty hard to attempt what the rest of the group could.

At one interval, we had to break into a testing lab in the center of New Mane City, and steal a number of highly unstable chemicals that was going to be used as part of a new drug ring. Most of us decided to prep for a few days, get the right equipment, and bust-in guns blazing. Three of the more, adolescent, members of the team (one of them was a child in spirit) thought it best to just grab an unmarked van and pull it off Mission Impossible style.

There attempt at the mission actually took place off of the main session days so that no one would know, and the GM wouldn't have to worry about anyone sitting around being bored. They attempted this strategy; a single agent will go in, and steal the stuff, one agent would watch the security feed and feed information to the other two operatives, and the last would reroute the security bots to different parts of the building as the lone agent made their way to the testing storage lab.

A relatively sound plan, as simple one's go, but they had missed a critical detail about the place; the way it is structured, and the lab's desire to get the most out of their checks, the place was literally pitch black on the inside, leaving the fate of the runner to the other agents.

The running agent (Delicate Feather) was caught, bound, and was (the following morning) beaten by a bunch of thugs, which also resulted in (A) a broken wing and dislocated leg, and (B) a group of partialy armored, half crazed spec. ops. agents to storm the building on a murder spree, just so we could save our little filly.

After the battle, no one got downed, or was captured any longer. I required some medical care when I "found" the laser hallway, some of the others required a few stiches from a few well placed shots, and the adult of the "alpha" team had acquired "Nam style" flashbacks because of how bad it was, but most of our concern was for Delicate Feather, who had to be hospitalized. The other side might have lost about 30 guys, but in the end, we felt like we were on the losing side.

We stormed the building again two days later, because we finally got the keycard to get into the chemical storage.

In a session where my real life brother was playing, and annoying the piss outta me, I hog tied him to the bed so he'd miss the chance to come along with the party through a portal. He stayed stuck like that for three hours.

I once played a ten-year-old psionic girl named Fuujin Mashirau. She and her compatriots, Erasmus Fruug and Rai (whose last name I forget), were hired to steal something important from a heavily-secured train.

We successfully made it onto the train and knocked out the guards for the car holding the package and locked the door behind us. Rai got hurt, but he could heal, so it wasn't too bad. Then we fought the guards inside the car and things went wrong. Rai went down quick, and I spent the next few rounds trying to use my un-trained healing skill to wake him up. Once I gave that up, I jumped into the fray only to be one-shot by a guard who had come in from the other door.

He proceeded to roll terribly for the rest of the fight, which we joked was because he was horrified at having accidentally killed a little girl. In the end, our airship (which we named Bob, because it does) showed up, getting Erasmus off the train with the package.

Fuujin was dead, Rai was captured, and Erasmus used the money from the job to buy a new airship (Bob two, because it does also).

One of my myth-weaver games is pretty much set in a dark time where one of the last great cities of an empire has been whittled down to a fraction of it's size; whatever parts of the city that hasn't been reduced to ruin being turned into a fortress against an onslaught of dragons and whatever dark things that seek the end of humanity. So it stands to reason that our first combat encounter would be pretty dark in keeping with the tone that was setup here.

Our party was sent, by way of barge, to secure supplies to help rebuild after the latest dragon attack. We were stopped in our travels when we discovered that the canal lock we needed to open was missing some parts. While searching for said parts, some of us stumbled on some kids and our attempts to help them was met with murder in their eyes followed by the sounds of an ambush.

To put it simply, I don't think any of us was truly prepared to fight off a swarm of murderous orphans. Some of us just immediately started to hack them down while the rest of us got creative in our attempts to not murder children (My oracle tried using ghost sounds to scare them away with the roar of a dragon...at level one. Kids, make sure you understand the limitations of a spell before basing your entire attack plan around it). It got ugly half way through when we realized they were under some kind of spell as one of them stopped attacking us. The rest, seeing as the girl was not under the same blood lust as they were, immediately tried to murder her as well.

In the end, half of them laid dead as the other half ran away and we did managed to save the girl. However, everyone had some interesting things to say to each other, especially our cleric to our paladin. Suffice to say, it was an interesting experience overall as we realized how ill equipped we were in dealing with some of the unique situations our GM might throw at us. At least we've become more cohesive as a group since then.

Gah! Getting a PC bricked sucks horribly. D: Last one I owned that bricked was due to something in the motherboard, and it killed the hardrive on it's way out. Devistating to say the least as at the time I used to draw comics online.

I do applaud the effort to vary up your paneling. It definitely will make it look better in the long run. :)

The only time I've ever had any physical problems with a computer was when I was eight. My dad had just upgrade my computer and I saw a cable that I thought he had missed and stuck it into a slot that fit on the motherboard. Turns out it didn't belong there and I fried the whole thing. Had to wait a few months before we got the money to fix the stupid thing. I've learned my lesson since then and just aimed to build computers that last. Still have my desktop after eight years of use and could probably still use it for another eight.

It's the start of a new arc, and he has been going at it for 575 Pages worth, without missing a beat.
I have to say this, you are deferentially one of the most consent comic up-loader I have every seen. You should be proud.
So for today, I just want you guys to praise him. He deserves it.

Every time anyone comments on a comic, it shows that the quality was such that it moved them to say something. The story time posts show that the comic has connected to fond memories of the past, moving us on an emotional level.

Every single comment ever posted is well deserved praise if you know how to read it. This is just asking for everyone to be a bit clearer.

Sure, I'll take any and every opportunity to praise people that I admire.

Making that guest comic a while back (and thus completing a childhood goal I've had for...well, obviously years), I've come to realize just how much effort it takes to not only make one of these things, but make it well: Getting all the right pictures, making sure your word bubbles fit, and getting the joke across without killing it with too many words. It's not as simple as I had originally thought.

So here's to Spud, one of the best comic creators I know about. Cheers!

As to your paneling, keep in mind you're adapting one format - animation - to another - still comics. This is quite different from having all your assets made for the format you're presenting in (which allows things like crossing the comic panels; entirely-out-of-panel art, such as Luna in that last one; or changing the art assets available to fit the scripted dialog). So don't sweat it: you're doing fine.

Yay, it's pretty again. And even the panel layout is prettier! I knew the constrained writing of the previous arc would make your freeform writing stronger, but I didn't anticipate THIS bonus. :D

Oh yes, very much so, ANW is right, I love the consistency. Nothing beats a webcomic that holds firm to its T/T/S update schedule. I've grown accustomed to it; it's why following The Order of the Stick is a bit heartbreaking. :'( I just have to WAIT...

You're calling it The Ticket Master? ??? Let me tell you, I could never do what you do with a screencap comic. If I wrote this, it would read more like an MST of the actual events than a totally original story like the way you've been doing it for a while... even throwing a slight wrench in things while keeping the visuals of the events the same, like Darths & Droids does, would be a bit beyond me.

...Great, now I'm tempted to do something like this as another exercise to stretch my writing skills. XD I don't have time for another one of those. My writing is in a very good place right now, I've overcome many of the limitations that used to get me stuck... yesterday I posted a chapter that put me over one million words on fanfiction.net, and the more recent 40% of that is pretty good stuff, so... I'm quite happy. But now I'm caught by the intriguing notion of trying to write a classical RPG screencap comic. Well... as I've said before, maybe next year. XD

One secret to holding firm to a schedule is to try to always be at least one comic ahead, preferably a few comics ahead. And then take that ahead-deadline seriously, such that if you ever do fall to 0 comics ahead, you get back up to a comic ahead as soon as possible.

Heck, newspaper comics require this - at least a week's lead, sometimes up to 6 weeks', IIRC. They want to make sure they're covered in case the artist winds up suddenly incapacitated (say, if you get a bad cold, or get hit by a car).

In a sense this is just self-restraint: waiting to post the next comic, instead of posting everything you have as soon as it's done. If you would have produced 3 comics a week anyway, but wait until you have that 3 comic buffer to start posting comics, then you'll have a week's buffer - and no one really cares if an all-new comic is not announced or started until a week later, if no one's been giving a specific start date until the first one is actually posted.

Stories about kids...hhmmmm...
Well, I can think of four campaigns I was a part of that had kids in them. In the one I ran (3.5E), a good friend played a young Kenku Psion who was the daughter of Pazuzu and considered the Aventi Paladin her older sister (note: the Paladin was the daughter of Dagon). At Nightmare Nights in Dallas last year I got to partake in the starter adventure for Ponyfinder (which was being DM'd by David Sterling himself), and our group rescued some abducted fillies/colts. A Rogue I'd made for a 3.5E campaign had an...interesting encounter with the children of the town our group was passing through. Waiting patiently outside the temple of (forgot deity's name), the DM remarked on the children playing in the street (it should be noted that strange things were occurring in town, and I latched onto this as some sort of plot hook). My Rogue began to stare at them intently, and it was a few seconds after I'd said that that realization dawned on me. Long story short, after a few skill checks (that I believe I failed) my character was now suspicious (and mildly frightened) of every kid in town, and the DM took multiple opportunities to poke fun at him, using normal characters to unravel the Rogue's sanity. One of our group even went so far as to reward a child after a particular scene (the child was slightly confused, but happy nonetheless).

The last campaign is a 5E in which I am again a Rogue, and this one fits better with Raxon's suggestions for posts. After winning a rap battle (which I think I've mentioned in a previous post), a Halfling child approached and marveled at my character's talent. The boy was even more eager to aid our group in our current quest of ridding the town of the bandit infestation.

He claims to know of a secret passage into their hideout.

After putting the boy's information to good use, we returned to town and I proceeded to prepare the boy's reward: a cape, worn by my Rogue through the badits' lair, monogrammed with my initials, and re-sized to fit the young fellow. He was ecstatic!

Cut to a couple of levels later, bad juju is everywhere, the townsfolk in the tavern blamed us for it, and outside there were zombiee, the Halfling boy one of them. Moving forward to the next session, myself and the Fighter make rounds in town to see if there are any more zombies. We found one: a little human boy clinging to his still-alive brother. Long story short, the live one got undead, the undead one got dead, and we brought the survivor to the local priestess to see what she could glean from this "ailment". Apparently she had a kind of "torture" room, so we strapped him to a rack and put a ball-gag on himn so he wouldn't bite anybody. We discovered a Necromancer was behind this, and, after a few levels, put him down like the ************************ he was (my Rogue went so far as to dismember the man's body, set it on fire, and destroy his skeleton, afterwards sobbing in a raging grief over the loss of his devoted fan, the Halfling boy).

Okay, waaaaaaaaay too much text.

P.S.---Doing great Spud! Keep it up! YOU ARE AAAAAAAWWWWWWWEEEEEEESSSSSSSOOOOOOOMMMMMMMEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

P.P.S.---To make things easier, those of you wishing to respond to my posts can call me Ru (like rue, but without the "e").